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National Cheddar Fries Day 2024
While it may seem like I’m falling back into the pattern of food of the day, National Cheddar Fries Day deserves some time and consideration. Keep reading and you can find out the new verb I’ve coined.
Stick To It Like Melted Cheddar
Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it. ~Julia Child
Okay, fries are less of a part of my diet than in years gone by. I don’t need the extra carbs. Apparently, I never did, but I particularly don’t need them now.
Even so, potatoes are a neutrally flavored item. It’s the deep fry oil and salt that made fries so appealing. They’re a finger-friendly side for a burger.
And then, back while I was in college, I discovered the joy of fries that were bathed in a glorious tidal wave of melted cheddar.
Back then, I didn’t need to worry about clogged arteries or any of the other alleged harm associated with this culinary miracle.
I was in my twenties and I lived on the eighth floor of my dormitory. My fully primed metabolism was further boosted by the several times per day that I dashed up and down eight flights of stairs.
I could eat or drink pretty much whatever I wanted without consequence.
Jump forward three decades and the metabolism is not what it used to be. Decades in a chair, working on software, has put an end to my carefree consumption of whatever the heck I want.
Even so, good God! Look at that dish of cheddar fries! Look at it! Who can say no to that?
It’s almost as hard as looking into my sweet Rose’s innocent little fuzzy face and saying no to her about virtually anything.
Even so, I really can’t.
Sometimes I can. Sometimes, you can do virtually anything. As long as you’re mindful of what you’re doing and the effect it has on you, you can have the occasional cheat or treat.
I am mindful of it. I try to eat healthy anymore.
I like healthy, natural food. I like nutrient rich foods and I like cooking them into something tasty and good for me.
And once in a while, I like something so decadent that simply looking at it could put ten pounds on you. Go figure, I’m only human.
Load ‘Em Up
How to Cook Loaded Fries
So, what can you do when potatoes are no longer as neutral as they once were? Fortunately, there are other roots available to be julienned into french fry form.
Apparently, jicama, turnips and parsnips are potato-like and suitable for all the things I enjoy about potatoes such a fries, scalloped, au gratin, mashed, etc.
Can’t Give Up On Potato? Potato Alternatives For Diabetics!
So, it’s good to know there are alternatives, but another alternative is to simply eat something else.
The Mediterranean Diet is currently held to be one of the healthiest diets. Not sure that I’m accomplishing that or doing it correctly, but I generally lean in that direction.
I love mushrooms, another neutral (and to my awareness, a generally harmless) food. They’re alright dry and raw, particularly on a salad, but when you steam them or broil them in butter…
As much as I love my sweet treats, mushrooms are something I can definitely eat every single day without getting tired of. Hmm, loaded cheddar mushrooms? Make it so…
Bacon Cheddar Stuffed Mushrooms
Reflection In The Work
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. ~Oscar Wilde
In AuthorTube circles, there’s an awful lot of importance given to voice, theme and so forth.
This is understandable. Typically, writers start as readers.
Throughout our school years, we’re taught how to appreciate literature by dissecting it.
Sure, you can just pick up a book and read it. Maybe you like it. Maybe not so much.
That’s a natural approach to story. You go through it and maybe it touches you somehow or maybe you merely endure it.
The next level is to really analyze it. What was the author trying to say?
Well, if it was Charles Dickens or Fyodor Dostoyevsky, chances are they had a big shiny axe to grind about something.
There are plenty of authors over the centuries between Don Quixote and the latest book to spin off the printing press today who had a deliberate point to make.
This is typical of plotters. People who like to plan everything before telling the story will often do the opposite of our beloved English teachers.
Instead of dissecting a literary piece for the many factors and categories that English teachers and bibliophiles of all stripes have done for centuries, these myrmidons of the keyboard will meticulously construct a mosaic of all the pieces that get the analytical types excited. They weave all the thematic bits and bobs into a charmingly complex story for literary scrutinizers to ooh and ah over.
There are considerations of theme, voice, message, style, influences of the author’s day, reflections of how today’s events change perception of the work, etc.
Whether you do it deliberately like a plotter putting together the ingredients of a recipe or whether you do it intuitively, the work is still just a reflection of you.
You are putting your heart and mind on the page. You’re drawn to a topic because you have something to say about it.
Maybe it’s a matter of social policy like Dickens. Perhaps it’s a matter of personal philosophy like Tolstoy. It might even be a curious exploration of a basic What If.
If you’re looking to win a Nobel Prize for Literature or one of the categorical prizes such as the Hugo, the Caldecott, the Man Booker, the Pulitzer, the Nebula or the Newberry, there is a formula to follow.
If you’re looking to get a book out of your head, it’s up to you how to proceed.
That’s my lane. How do I proceed?
Well, in the case of Holiday Season Serial Romances, I have a Christmas themed website for which I need fresh content.
In the vein of Hallmark Channel Christmas romance movies, I start with a basic RomCom writing prompt and see where it takes me.
The unique twist in my stories is not only the fact that it is me who is writing it (the secret ingredient in each and every book ever written IS the author, full stop) but that it takes place in the same “literary universe” as my superhero series.
For The Sentinels, I’m taking my lifelong love of comic books and comic book based media to construct a tridecology following the Hero’s Journey in reference to the team as a whole.
One of the things that annoys me about a lot of AuthorTube videos is the assumption that there must be a “main character”. My main character is the ensemble cast. Any given book in the series may have a central character and his or her primary antagonist, but my intention is to show the entire superhero team as the “main character” through the social dynamics and the role they play in the team to help accomplish what one of them could not do on their own.
As an aside to the main plotline of the superhero team’s tridecology, I will be writing my Collateral Impact anthologies as a set of companion pieces to each of the novels that will examine the impact of key events on regular people. This is my reaction to the absurdity of action sequences in movies and to the notion of “killing your darlings” in writing.
Much is made of ruthlessly hacking away all extraneous details or events in the interest of maintaining reader interest. We’re told that we no longer have the luxury of ponderous tomes that were produced in an age before TV or even radio. When reading books was the primary form of entertainment on demand, works could be as ponderous as War and Peace, we’re told.
Okay, but Brandon Sanderson has some gigantic novels and so does George R. R. Martin. God forbid he’d get back in and finish the fucking series, but he got published with huge, huge, huge books ranging between 694 and 1016 pages or 298,000 to 424,000 words. “Common wisdom” holds that 50,000 to 90,000 words are all the more the reading public can cope with.
Bah! Huge modern works aren’t exclusively in genre fiction either. Award-winning literary fiction works by Eleanor Catton, Jonathan Franzen, Haruki Murakami and Donna Tartt have word counts from 180,000 to 296,000. A story well told can be as long as it needs to be and still have appeal and even acclaim.
Tales Of Olde Auringia reflects my fascination with heroic fantasy.
From the first time I played with my dad’s classic Marx Castle Fort Playset, I had a fascination for medieval adventure.
As I saw movies like The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Court Jester, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and heard fairy tails like Jack & The Beanstalk, Hansel and Gretel and Puss In Boots, it sparked my creativity and instilled a love of sword fights, monsters, castles and the like.
Auringia is a D&D campaign world that I devised for some friends of mine to play in a while back, but it seems like a great place to set a collection of fantasy adventure stories in.
You know what? I don’t care if some people don’t like generic pseudo-European medieval fantasy. Feel free to walk right past it.
If I try to set it in a pseudo-Not-European environment, I’ll get panned by the #OwnVoices types. How dare you?
My heritage is Anglo-Germanic with a touch of French and Italian. I’m not Slavic. I’m not Swahili. I’m not Aztec. I’m not East Asian. I’m not going to wander out of “my lane”.
Knights in castles. Bandits in forests. Goblins in caves. Witches in high towers. That’s “my lane”.
King Arthur, Charlemagne, Robin Hood, Jack the Giant Killer are “my lane”.
There are plenty of people who like that. There are plenty of people who aren’t automatically bored by it because somebody’s got a sword and a euro-type name. It will be okay…
As with the previous genre, the Far-Flung Reaches are inspired by my experience with my dad’s classic Tom Corbett Space Academy playset by Marx and many Saturday afternoons watching Flash Gordon and tons of other sci-fi shows on UHF with my parents and sister. Along came Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Star Blazers and tons more shows and movies to explore the universe. Eventually, role playing games like Star Frontiers and Traveller sparked an interest in storytelling in these space opera settings.
Again, on the topic of word counts, space opera and “hard” science fiction has produced some of the wordiest tomes in popular fiction. James S. A. Corey of The Expanse series ranges between 136,000 and 153,000 words per book. Frank Herbert ran between 60,000 and 187,000 words in the Dune series.
Surprisingly, Arthur C. Clarke fits in the genre fiction guardrails with books ranging between 53,000 and 96,000 words but makes them feel like they’re 10x as long. God, that guy’s prose is so goddamn boring.
Peter F. Hamilton wrote some whoppers between 365,000 and 430,000 words in the early 2000’s. So, the admonition to stay within 50,000 – 90,000 is far from a hard and fast rule.
That being said, I’m not here to specifically or deliberately write giant tomes. What I’m saying is that the AuthorTubers who make these statements need to kind of get over themselves. A rule of thumb for optimal marketing is all well and good, but there’s no need to constrain yourself to fast food word count constraints.
Yeah, people want a page turner they can read through on the beach or waiting at the dentist’s office or whatever.
Kelly tears through these funny bird mysteries by Donna Andrews in a few evenings. Donna keeps to the 70,000-90,000 word count in order to churn out unbelievable volumes of comic mysteries. It’s a great way to ensure continued book revenue to facilitate the writer’s life.
Apart from the fact that I have little time for writing right now, my expectation is that I will fall somewhere between the oh-so-marketable book word count thresholds and the that’s-what-the-hell-it-takes-to-tell-the-whole-story word count thresholds of Corey, Hamilton, GRRM, Murakami or Catton.
Literally. It takes what it takes. It may seem as self-indulgent as a decent plate of cheddar fries, but it’s true. It takes what it takes, regardless of marketing guidelines.
So, will I have to break out some of the plotlines of The Sentinels tridecology into supplemental books in order to keep manageable word counts? Maybe, maybe not.
It takes what it takes and getting it published will not be gatekept by the TradPub hamster wheel. It will be gatekept by my capacity to get them written, edited, covered and printed.
Getting that done depends on a variety of factors that are or are not within my control at the moment.
My current struggle is finding the time and energy to actually get some writing done. I am so ridiculously busy at work these days. It’s a lot. I’ve been jealously guarding my weekends, but I’m so beat from a week of what I do that I rarely have the juice to type out a coherent scene or chapter.
I’m also struggling to adapt the structure I use to get my Holiday Season Serial Romances done quickly to doing likewise for The Sentinels. It’s a bit of a square peg in a round hole situation.
With the Christmas RomComs, I have a structure that I follow (approximately 1000 words per day from Black Friday through Twelfth Night). I have a point of departure and a rough estimate of words per episode with a fixed destination (happily ever after by the last day of the holiday season).
Even though I totally pants these things and have no idea what’s going to happen, the basic formula ensures that I hit some consistent ups and downs, some friction and obstacles and come out with an interesting journey to the inevitable happy ending. It works for me and I’m getting the work done (sometimes in the St. Nick of time).
For the superheroes, I have a rough plan, a basic roster of supers, the Hero’s Journey as a roadmap for the overall course of the series, some events that I’ve broadcasted through the Christmas RomComs, a lot of worldbuilding and the entire corpus of DC, Marvel and various independent comics to riff on.
And yet, I’m struggling to put it all together because I’m struggling to stay true to my basic pantser/gardener/discovery writer nature and a profound need to hybridize and be a “plantser” (portmanteau of plotter and pantser) and also because I’m so incredibly tired and starved for time to do the writing.
On a positive note, I did learn how to configure labels in Microsoft Access for use in a Zebra printer and I coined a new verb yesterday (new to me, at least):
Perpendiculate
- The act of trying to configure a label as a 90° version of itself.
- The act of laying someone out in a scuffle
- What happens when you drink heavily and then stand up abruptly (almost happened to me in Leningrad, 1989)
It’s a shame it’s more than seven letters or I could use it on Kelly when we’re playing Scrabble.
I hope you have a sumptuous, cheddar-slathered weekend. I’m just recovering from an intense week of work and the effort is looking like it’s going to perpendiculate me before long.